Ordinary Lives One Minute, Chaos The Next

April 23, 1995|By RICK BRAGG The New York Times

The people who filled the federal office building in downtown Oklahoma City on Wednesday morning were there to pay off loans at the credit union, to sign up for Social Security, to put in eight hours for a paycheck that never seemed quite enough.

The very smallest of them, at a day care center on the second floor, were there to sing the ABCs and color outside the lines.

Sometime after 9 a.m. CDT, before the first cup of coffee got cold, many of them were murdered.

On Saturday, as much of the world concentrated on why this happened and who was to blame, four families grieved at coffee tables, ate pound cake brought by sympathetic neighbors and rehashed the lives of the people they loved.

ZACKARY CHAVEZ, 3

He was born in a neighborhood where most dreams climb only one story high.

On the south side of Oklahoma City, the streets are crowded with single-story, wood-frame houses. It is a working-class neighborhood. People make the best of what they have.

On 101st Street, Zackary, a desperado with a water pistol, lived with his single mother, surrounded by an army of aunts and uncles.

The Chavez Hernandez clan, third-generation Mexican-Americans, gave him all they could afford. On March 23, his third birthday, his family threw the standard neighborhood bash: a party at McDonald's. Zackary had McNuggets.

On the day of the bombing, Zackary almost did not go to day care. An uncle, who was staying home from work with the flu, had offered to baby sit. But Zackary's mother was afraid her son would catch the flu.

"My heart stopped when I saw what happened on TV," said Zackary's aunt, Kathy Chavez Hernandez.

On Thursday, the family identified Zackary through his red-and-white shirt with a teddy bear on it.

Offers of free burial have poured in from wealthier sections of Oklahoma City, but Max Chavez Hernandez, an uncle, said there had been no offers of a grave site near the family's neighborhood.

"We want to bury him close to home," Chavez said.

RICK TOMLIN, 46

His recent promotion in the Department of Transportation had brought a better office, one with a view from the fourth floor.

"I've got a window," Tomlin had joked to his wife, Tina. "I must be somebody."

Now the fourth floor is fused with others in what rescue workers call a pancake. The civil servant has been missing for four days.

Tina Tomlin waits for word. The neighbors along Arrowhead Road bring food and kind words to their middle-class home in the suburbs.

"So you live on the corner?" she asked a neighbor she had never seen. "Thank you so much for coming by."

Tina Tomlin, 42, knows that any chance her husband survived weakens every hour. But they have been married 25 years and have raised two grown sons.

"Why did he have to die?" she asked. "No, no, I didn't mean to say that."

Her husband had served in Vietnam and hoped he had left violence behind forever. His favorite song was John Lennon's Imagine.

"He didn't like war," she said. "He didn't like killing."

THE COVERDALES

Aaron Coverdale, 5, and his brother Elijah, 2, lived with their grandmother, Jannie Coverdale. She always dressed them well.

"They were her hearts," said their father, Keith Coverdale, a truck driver who is often on the road.

He carried a picture, taken just a week before, of two shiny-faced boys standing tall in their new Easter suits. Their bodies were found in the rubble; on Saturday evening, they were taken to the Temple and Son funeral home.

Aaron Coverdale took care of his little brother. Each day at the day care center they played together, and Aaron tried to coax Elijah to follow rules, even take a nap when he was told.

LOLA BOLDEN, 40

Mary Bolden's daughter is coming home to Birmingham, Ala.

Bolden works in the kitchen at the county nursing home, near Birmingham. She was home when the call came that her daughter was in the Oklahoma City federal building when it was bombed.

Sgt. 1st Class Lola Bolden, an Army recruiter, had never been in love with Alabama. Born in the small town of Dixiana, she had joined the Army because it was a better job than flipping burgers at the Krystal in Jefferson County.

Lola Bolden, who was divorced, had planned to retire in two years and move to Colorado with her two sons, ages 13 and 11.

Mary Bolden understands a lot of hard things in life, but this puzzles her.

"I wonder why," she said. "She was only trying to make an honest living. Then all of a sudden her life is over."